American Electric

Did Franklin fly that kite?

We are said to be living in an icon-smashing age, but the odd thing is how few shards can be found on the floor. Joe DiMaggio may now be chilly and Bing Crosby charmless, but the essential pantheon of heroes remains in place. Lincoln, John Adams, Lewis and Clark, Seabiscuit—those who matter most to us are intact, and the common activity is not to smash their images but to trace on them, as though with a diamond pen, the signature of our own favored flaws, allowing their heroism to shine through more brightly. The thrust of popular history has been to remake old heroes as more like us than we knew, and better than us than we could imagine. (Even John Kennedy, if sicker than we recognized, was braver, too.) The Founding Fathers have been remade as Founding Brothers, our superior siblings.

Of them all, Benjamin Franklin seems the most secure, since he has always been the most “human,” the one Founding Father who has no trace of asceticism, neither Massachusetts Puritan nor Virginia Neo-Roman. He is all godless materialist Pennsylvania merchant (although he borrowed some simplicity from the Quakers from time to time, as the need suited him). You could swing a baseball bat of propriety at him, and he would bounce back, beaming. This gives him, and his legend, endless vitality. If you were a child growing up in Philadelphia in the nineteen-sixties, Franklin was still alive, everywhere you looked. At night, his electric profile, wattles outlined in neon, hovered above the city in the sign for the Benjamin Franklin Hotel. He was known in Philadelphia the way St. Francis was known in Assisi, as both presiding deity and local boy.

Central to his myth was the story of the Kite and Key. (An honors society at the University of Pennsylvania still has that name.) He went out to a field in a thunderstorm, flew his kite, saw it struck by lightning, and then watched the lightning sparkle around a key held in a jar at the end of the kite twine. If he put his knuckle on the twine, he could feel the spark. What this accomplished, exactly, was something that schoolboys were vague about: “He discovered electricity” was the usual formula. In fact, he had shown that lightning was a form of electricity, and that ingenuity could hold its own against book learning. In one of the two greatest editorial emendations in American letters (the other is Maxwell Perkins keeping Fitzgerald from calling “Gatsby” “Trimalchio in West Egg”), Franklin changed Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to the modest, conclusive “We hold these truths to be self-evident”—and Franklin could make that change because he was known as the master of self-evidence, with all the authority of a man willing to face down lightning with a kite while everyone else was safe inside arguing about ideas. “He Took Lightning from the Sky and the Scepter from the Tyrant’s Hand” was the (originally Latin) inscription that a French poet would later offer, conclusively.

Now, however, a new book argues that the legend on which Franklin’s reputation rests is dubious. There was no kite, no key, no bolt, no knuckle, no charge. He let people believe that he had been places he never went, done things he never did, and seen things that never happened. No wonder he’s been called the father of American journalism.

The new book, “Bolt of Fate,” by Tom Tucker (Public Affairs; $25), is part of an apparently unstoppable wave of Franklin biography. In the past three years, we have had Edmund S. Morgan’s short, loving “Benjamin Franklin” (Yale; $24.95) and H. W. Brands’s “The First American” (Doubleday; $35), and this month Walter Isaacson’s energetic, entertaining, and worldly “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” (Simon & Schuster; $30) joins them. Two more Franklin biographies are supposedly on the way. Tucker’s book, it should be said, is not so much a wet blanket cast over the party as an “Aw, nuts” uttered at it: his evidence is far from conclusive, but neither does his book have any of the usual telltale signs of overreaching, special pleading, paranoia, or conspiracy-mongering. This is Franklin unmasked, but not, so to speak, Franklin dressed up in women’s clothing. True or false, Tucker’s argument touches on the heart of who Franklin was, who we want him to be, and who he might have been. “Eripuit coelo fulmen”—he snatched the lightning from the sky. What if, just conceivably, he didn’t?

There are no bad biographies of Franklin for the same reason that there are no bad Three Stooges movies, or, for that matter, demolition derbies: something always happens. Just when Franklin is getting becalmed in diplomatic squabbles, say, or running a tedious printing business in a provincial city, he writes about farts or invents bifocals. Yet there is, even in Isaacson’s genial book and Morgan’s almost hagiographic one, a sense that this figure is seen at a distance, and remains hard to know. Where John Adams comes before us in all his bad-tempered intelligence, and Washington in his thin-lipped realism, Franklin is elusive: he can at times be Santa Claus or William James, bubbly and intelligent, and at times he is Franklin Roosevelt, with a carefully composed affability overlaying a character essentially calculating and remote.

In part, this is because he had to adapt to two different times, one of which, at least, he helped to make. His career, as Isaacson suggests, bridges two centuries of sensibility: in the first half of his life, up until the seventeen-fifties, we are in a largely seventeenth-century world of nascent capitalism and virtuous upward mobility. Franklin is an ambitious early capitalist operator at the edge of the empire, a provincial Pepys. He starts a business from scratch and chases women, and both the culture and the science around him feel skin-thin. By the end of the Franklin biographies, we are in a late-Enlightenment world of fully fledged science and sensibility—where the reign of violence and feeling is beginning. This is partly a question of place, Philadelphia traded for Paris, but it is also an effect of growing knowledge and an expanded universe, and science is the crossing point. The electrical experiments are the link between the early Franklin and the later Franklin—between the young striver and the Papa Savant.

Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, to a family of freethinking artisans, and was apprenticed as a boy to his half brother James, a printer. A printer in those Colonial days often had his own newspaper, and James’s was the New England Courant, America’s first independent paper. Benjamin picked up the newspapering habit—for a brief period, still an adolescent, he ran the paper while his brother was in jail over a censorship dispute. But he disliked his brother (“I fancy his harsh and tyrannical treatment of me might be a means of impressing me with that aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life,” he wrote years later) and, at seventeen, ran away to Philadelphia, a village of two thousand people that nonetheless dreamed of itself as a metropolis of tolerance. Compared with Mathered Boston, it was.

Franklin, tall and physically formidable—he was a terrific swimmer and runner—almost immediately brought himself to the center of Philadelphia life. He earned a reputation as the publisher and editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper begun by a printer whom he helped drive out of business. Like Dr. Johnson, his almost exact contemporary, he made his way by sheer force of talent as a miscellaneous journalist; unlike the bulldoggish Dr. Johnson, he understood, and pioneered, the American principle that it pays to be liked. “The consummate networker,” as Isaacson calls him, he turned a little circle of fellow-apprentices and small tradesmen, the Junto, into a kind of freewheeling all-purpose civic association. He was a funny writer, with a dry, pawky prose style, modelled on Addison’s, and a taste for pseudonymous pranks; he hid his most acerbic opinions behind the masks of made-up characters. But he had world-class ambitions, and he understood that those ambitions were probably best served by achievement in natural philosophy—the sciences. No one in London gave a damn about Philadelphia politics, but they cared about Philadelphia lightning. Distance lends authority to experiments: if it can be done out there, it can be done anywhere.

Franklin had just given up his career as a printer when he began his work as an “electrician,” fascinated by the small shocks you could make out of amber rods and glass jars. Electricity was not yet a serious science. Though everyone agreed that it was a phenomenon, no one was sure at first if it was a phenomenon like the hula hoop or a phenomenon like gravity. People played with it for fun. Then, in the seventeen-forties, the Leyden jar, an early capacitor, showed that an electrical charge could be held in place and made to pass through glass. Essentially, you could collect and store electricity; and in 1749 Franklin reported to the Royal Academy in London that he had created the first electric battery.

In his correspondence with the academy, he understood that he would inevitably be viewed as a provincial, and that it paid to play the clown a little. In the midst of his serious submissions, he also wrote to the academy, apropos the state of “American electricity,” that “a turkey is to be killed for our dinners by the electrical shock, and roasted by the electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle, when the healths of all the famous electricians in England, France and Germany, are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge of guns from the electrical battery.” The metropolis, while it mistrusts an upstart, forgives a lovable provincial eccentric. (Though he was being funny about the American enthusiasm for electricity, he wasn’t entirely joking. He electrocuted at least one turkey, and boasted of how tender it was, a thing typical of the way he could turn a joke into a fact.)

Previously, it had been proposed that there were two different kinds of electricity, both fluid: one generated by glass and one generated by resin. Franklin, experimenting with varieties of electric shock, swiftly arrived at a fundamental insight: that electricity was a single fluid, and that what he was the first to call “positive” and “negative” charges came from having too much or too little of it. The importance of Franklin’s theory, as the great historian of science I. Bernard Cohen has shown, was not only that it insisted on the conservation of charge but that it accepted “action at a distance”: there didn’t have to be holes for the charge to pass through, or invisible levers in the sky to send it along; electricity was just there, like gravity.

Many people, whatever theory they held, had noticed that lightning in the sky looked a lot like electricity in a jar, only there was more of it. In 1749, it seems, Franklin himself made a list of the resemblances, a list that reveals the tenor of his scientific mind, at once disarmingly particular and searching for unity: “Electrical fluid agrees with lightning in these particulars. 1. Giving light. 2. Color of the light. 3. Crooked direction. 4. Swift motion. 5. Being conducted by metals. 6. Crack or noise in exploding. 7. Subsisting in water or ice. . . . Since they agree in all particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this? Let the experiment be made.” The lightning experiment would be suggestive about the centrality of electricity in an essentially Newtonian world picture. The simpler the world picture, the less intricate the celestial mechanics, and the greater the play of universal forces, however bizarre their action. E pluribus unum applied—a motto that Franklin, once again running from the absurd to the solemn, took from a classical recipe for salad dressing.

Did he really do it? There were actually two experiments. In 1750, Franklin proposed that if you could get up high enough to be above trees and other natural obstacles, on a steeple or a spire, safely insulated in a sentry box (about the size of a telephone booth), you might be able to draw electricity from a thundercloud through a long iron rod, and “determine whether the clouds that contain lightning are electrified or not.” A group of French scientists who read the proposal—for all that it took six weeks for mail to cross the Atlantic, there was a constant and meaningful exchange of ideas and data—tried it, in a town called Marly, outside Paris, and found that it worked. (Significantly, the apparatus didn’t function right away—no experiment ever really works the first time you try it, for the same reason that no child’s toy ever works on Christmas morning, the first time you assemble it—and it was a fairly lowly assistant who eventually made the discovery.)

Well, if you didn’t have a steeple or a spire, you could use a kite to make the same experiment, with a key attached at a silk ribbon to the twine on the kite; the key and the twine would conduct the electricity. Franklin published an account of this experiment—which took place, if it did, sometime in 1752—in the Pennsylvania Gazette,and it is worth quoting, for its clarity and for its odd future tenses. After some details about the construction of the kite, which is to be made of a “large thin silk handkerchief,” Franklin explains:

The kite is to be raised, when a thunder-gust appears to be coming on, (which is very frequent in this country) and the person, who holds the string, must stand within a door, or window, or under some cover, so that the silk riband may not be wet. . . . As soon as any of the thunder-clouds come over the kite, the pointed wire will draw the electric fire from them; and the kite, with all the twine, will be electrified; and the loose filaments of the twine will stand out every way, and be attracted by the approaching finger. When the rain has wet the kite and twine, so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the key on the approach of your knuckle. . .. All the other electrical experiments [can] be performed, which are usually done by the help of a rubbed glass globe or tube, and thereby the sameness of the electric matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.

The first thing to note is that there is no bolt of lightning. Lightning, as Tucker points out, is a weird phenomenon. You won’t find it by waiting in a field, and, if you did, it might fry you like a turkey; it would certainly vaporize the twine. What Franklin was trying to get was the electrostatic energy in clouds, which is usually there.

The next thing to note is the conditional spirit in which Franklin tells the story: he doesn’t say he did it; he says that it can be done. This, Tucker notes, is not the era’s usual scientific style, and in other cases Franklin is very careful, to the fetishistic degree beloved of eighteenth-century science, to say exactly what, when, and how. Tucker writes, “In his letter to George Whatley, an old London friend, describing the invention of bifocal glasses and in his ‘Description of an Instrument for Taking Down Books from High Shelves’ Franklin is unambiguous: he invented both items, he writes at length, he gives specifics, he uses active voice, he offers diagrams, he says he did it.” In this first account, anyway, he doesn’t.

The third thing to note is how hard it is to do. Tucker argues that a kite made of the kind of handkerchief that would have been available (a thirty-inch square of lingerie-thin silk), dragging a standard chunky key of the time (a quarter-pound brass latchkey), would have been nearly impossible to fly in the first place, especially if you were trying to keep it aloft from inside a shed—you can’t get the key out and up. (Tucker notes that the job of keeping the key from falling to the ground while you’re still flying the kite—and doing both from inside some kind of box—is one that has defeated the imagination of every illustrator, including Currier & Ives, who put Franklin’s hand above the key, on the electrified twine, to support the weight.) He says that he himself tried the experiment and couldn’t get the kite off the ground: “My wife held a large picture frame as a stand-in for a window frame. When I tried to keep the key safely on my side of the picture frame and ‘dry’ and not let the line brush against the frame, especially with the reduced handling caused by the dangling key, there came the sudden realization: He-really-didn’t-do-this.” Which may have been a good thing. Tucker says that the experiment was also fantastically dangerous, and Franklin was lucky not to get killed trying to do it, if he did it.

Isaacson, for his part, rejects Tucker, and sensibly directs us toward Cohen’s books on Franklin’s science. Cohen notes that other people claimed to have reproduced the experiment not long afterward, but for Cohen perhaps the most important consideration in its favor is the simple fact that Franklin said that he did it. The idea that Franklin might have made up his account is simply alien to his conception of Franklin.

Who is to decide when doctors disagree? It is, finally, as conservatives like to say, all about character. And here one approaches an area of subtle gradations, easy to misinterpret. Tucker points to evidence of Franklin’s series of hoaxes as conclusive, or anyway highly suggestive. He offers a long list and shows how they often advanced Franklin’s career; for instance, when he was just starting out as a printer he wrote a pseudonymous essay in favor of paper currency and then, after the legislature had been persuaded, got the government contract to print money. As Tucker recognizes, the majority of these impostures are closer to deadpan satiric jokes than they are to self-seeking lies. Franklin liked to write letters claiming to be from other people—a “famous Jesuit,” or a Scottish Presbyterian—in order to dramatize some political point through obvious overload. The last thing he wrote was a letter purportedly from a Muslim slaver, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim,” whose lust for slavery was intended to hold a mirror up to the American slaveholder’s own, and shame him.

This is the reason for Franklin’s opacity and, perhaps, for the doubts about the kite, which do not begin with Tucker. Franklin was an instinctive ironist. That is not to make him contemporary; it was Enlightenment irony, not Duchampian irony—begun as a way of getting past censorship. But it was his natural mode, as in the joke about the electrocuted turkeys: which was a joke, and had a serious point, and was something he actually did, and the whole thing depended on being reported with an absolutely straight face. It was not that he did not value honesty. He did. It is that he did not value sincerity, a different thing. He would have been reluctant to say something that he believed to be a lie. But, as a businessman and a writer and a diplomat, he might very well have been willing to dramatize, or even overdramatize, something he believed to be essentially the truth.

Everyone, doubters and believers, meets in Paris, for what all can agree on is that the image of Franklin, the American electrician, was more essential to his success as a diplomat in France than any other element of his legend. By 1776, Franklin was, of course, a very senior American, and his tastes and allegiances, which throughout his life had been almost passionately English and imperial, seemed fully formed. He came home from a long posting to London as a representative of the Pennsylvania legislature, and was immediately asked to join the first Congress. He was, at the start, suspected by the more radical patriots of being a “wet,” if not actually a spy. (His son William, with whom he was said to have done the kite-flying, was then the loyal Tory governor of New Jersey.) But he soon proved to be as ardently in favor of unilateral independence as Adams or Jefferson. (“He does not hesitate at our boldest Measures, but rather seems to think us too irresolute,” John wrote to Abigail, perpetually annoyed at Franklin’s gift for arriving late at a party and then lighting all the candles on the cake.) And, when it became plain that the war for independence would live or die on French aid, he was the obvious candidate to go to France and ask for it. “There can be no question that when Franklin arrived in France on that grave mission he was already a public figure,” Cohen writes. “And this was so because of his stature as a scientist and because of the spectacular nature of his work on lightning.” We may have thought we were sending over Will Rogers; they thought they were getting Richard Feynman.

Franklin’s essentially ironic, distancing turn of mind, which was often so baffling to his literal-minded American colleagues—Isaacson’s funniest pages are supplied by John Adams’s stunned and alarmed accounts of Franklin’s nonchalant diplomacy on the Paris mission—gave him a kind of second sight into the minds of his hosts. There is little sham in French life, but a lot of show, a lot of rhetorical gesturing. Franklin understood the style instantly. He was pretending to be a naïf (he left his wig and powder, which he normally wore, back home in Philadelphia), which the French knew to be faux, and they were pretending to be worldly, which he knew to be an illusion.

Franklin was not just shrewder than he seemed, having the measure of his host very well down. He was also politically far more skillful. As Morgan points out, there was no necessity for the French to side with the Americans, whose cause looked like the longest of long shots and involved making league with a frankly king-hating new republic. Adams and the ornery Arthur Lee, another member of the French mission, were exasperated by Franklin’s attention to social trivia. Why didn’t he just bluntly insist on the power political formula that stared them in the face? America is the enemy of England, England is the enemy of France. Franklin understood that the “realistic” formula was essentially empty, and that there was, and is, no more maddeningly fatuous cliché than that nations have interests rather than affections. It was in France’s interest to supplant the British, against its interest to support a republic, in its interest to form an alliance with the Spanish and leave the Americans alone, and on and on. But the logic of power depends largely on the perceptions, and feelings, of the people who have it. Franklin understood that, above all, the good opinion of the French mattered. It paid to be liked and admired, and he made sure that he was. He knew that he could not make his country, and its needs, inescapable if he did not make himself, and his cause, irresistible.

Was Franklin, because he was calculating and clear-eyed, a fraud? Nothing seems more false. Might he have, in the American, or, for that matter, the electrical, cause, massaged the data in what he thought was the pursuit of truth, or told a half-truth and then been enclosed within it? Nothing seems more human.

One need not have a pragmatic or skeptical vision of truth to have a charitable view of the frailty of those who pursue it. The electrical kite could never have really been a hoax, because it was never really a claim. Even if the experiment did take place, it would not, on its own, have counted as scientific data by any standard, Enlightenment or modern. There was no specification, no replication by the experimenter, no protocol. It was, really, a thought experiment: if you did this, then what might happen? Despite all the rhetoric, much of it self-created, of Franklin as natural man, pragmatic man, empirical man, man with a kite, the plain truth is that his genius was, in every realm, for airy abstraction brought to earth, the single-fluid theory of life.

Franklin the political theorist was not drawing on his own experience, either, which consisted entirely of more or less slavish negotiations with colonial powers and absolute monarchs. He was, in the end, proposing a system of governance that no one had experienced at all. It was a pure thought experiment, a kite that might fly.

The moral of the kite is not that truth is relative. It is that nothing is really self-evident. Scientific truths, like political beliefs, are guesses and arguments, not certainties. Dr. Johnson’s great, comforting gloss on the Christian funeral service comes to mind: “In the sure and certain hope of a resurrection” did not mean that the resurrection was certain, only that the hope was certain. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” similarly, means that we hold them to be so. We hold these truths as we hold the twine, believing, without being sure, that the tugs and shocks are what we think they are. We hold the string, and hope for the best. Often, there is no lightning. Sometimes, there is no kite. ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986.